Dan Bricklin responds to my paraphrasing of his comments about Bluetooth. This is interesting material:

I think you got the Bluetooth thing kind of right — though I’m not especially in favor of “802.11” as it is, but rather “a standard IP-based transport that we can just connect to without special stacks”, which 802.11 is as currently used (and why it’s so successful) and Bluetooth didn’t want to be. He seems to like Bluetooth’s simple, pre-defined P2P rendezvousing, assuming that we couldn’t do as well or better in a more general IP-based system. (P2P with only 7 devices sounds pretty lame long-term.) Most of my complaints at the meeting were about him proposing applications (like replacing the connection to a monitor or video feed or even 3G) that need much more bandwidth than the 700Kb/sec or so he claimed for Bluetooth. (For example, a minimum monitor today running at 30 frames a second with 1024 x 768 pixels x 24 bit color needs 30x1024x768x24=566Mb/sec.) Bluetooth is much more complex and application-specific than 802.11. IrDA (the red infrared windows) is in just about all laptops yet almost none of us use it, and it was built with similar protocols as Bluetooth (actually, it’s some of the same people and IrDA-emulation is one of the many specific Bluetooth application stacks). … As I told him [John Landry] afterward, of course, I do agree with some of the premises of his new company as he presented it, just not the wonderfulness of Bluetooth or general broadcast of “common” material determined by someone “who knows best”.

Re: Bluetooth (I read this the night before the meeting and was thinking about): — Bill Howard about price and speed: “Adding a $150 Epson Bluetooth adapter to a $300 Epson printer (Stylus Photo 890) seems a big hit on price, especially when color photos-Epson’s claim to fame-take a long time to print (for text documents, the speed is fine).” (A 2MB picture takes over 20 seconds to send over Bluetooth. To share 50 pictures I took with you takes over 15 minutes.)

Categories: Uncategorized dw